Love Quote by Theodore Roethke

Roethke’s line lands with the quiet force of a personal creed, not a declaration of romance. “I came” repeats like a footstep: arrival, then arrival again, as if the self has to be earned through motion rather than merely possessed. The first destination is “love,” but the second is more startling - “my own” - a phrase that turns identity into territory reclaimed. Love isn’t the reward at the end of selfhood; it’s the passage through which selfhood becomes possible.

The subtext is classic Roethke: psychic weather rendered in simple diction that hides the struggle underneath. “Came to love” suggests apprenticeship, not instant grace. Love here reads as an ethic of attention - to another person, to the living world, to the body’s difficult facts. Then “came into my own” implies a delayed inhabiting of the self, the way someone might finally settle into a house after years of feeling like a guest. The line compresses a whole narrative of late-arriving coherence.

Context matters: Roethke wrote out of intense inner turbulence, including bouts of mental illness, and he made a career of turning private instability into disciplined music. That tension animates the phrasing. There’s no triumphal trumpet-blast, just a modest grammar that makes becoming sound almost accidental - as if love, practiced and survived, tilts the speaker into possession of his life. The artistry is the understatement: a clean sentence carrying a messy biography without naming it.